The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Knocked Up in Lieu of Alarm Clocked
- Pleideans shot down U.S. mystery missile attack on Iran
- JourneyQuest: fan-supported, CC-licensed fantasy/comedy series
- Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto
- Biggest image on Wikipedia?
- T-Mobile G2 phones comprehensively jailbroken
- TSA: checkpoint groping doesn't exist
- Science fictional music video set in near-future Indian city
- The future of paper, or possibly wood, or both
- Mick and Keith: A love story
- Haiku for people who hate cilantro
- Action Plants: time-lapse videos
- The Adventures of White-Man: satirical toy puppetry from Paul Zaloom
- Photographer: I got griggs'd 4.5 million times by Texas
- Factory farmers in Israel stumped by animal rights activists' well-hidden webcam
- Justice Dept. Will Not Prosecute CIA Agents Who Destroyed Torture Tapes
- Jumping Kitteh: HOW HAI? (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
- National Gaming Day at your library: US libraries invite patrons to get their game on
- Your wife is embarrassed by your tiny paycheck ad: Dec, 1929
- Mistake reports
- RIP, Robbins Barstow, godfather of the home movie revival
- Google Street View shows what the world really looks like
- New factory in Mojave to produce White Knight spacecraft for Virgin Galactic space tourism
- Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds
- Make guitar picks from plastic cards
- Elvis' (fake) drug prescription
- The Realist: every issue now online!
- To Eris, human!
- You Have the Right to Repair
- Jesus, that's a big statue
| Knocked Up in Lieu of Alarm Clocked Posted: 09 Nov 2010 10:04 PM PST The things one learns, when one has children. Many facts about fire trucks, planets, geography, tiny people who live in one's house, faeries, and...knocker-ups or knocker-uppers. We brought home from the library this delightful book, Mary Smith by A. (Andrea) U'Ren, riffing off Mary Smith, a knocker-up who woke people in the early 20th century in East London. She ran about with a short rubber hose shooting dried peas at the windows of subscribers who needed to be awoken at a certain time in the morning. The indefatigable Daniel Pinkwater discussed the book with Scott Simon on NPR, and read it aloud back in August 2007. Knocker-ups (knockers-up?) are part of the panoply of professions that popped up between the Industrial Revolution and the Golden Age of Technology, when people crowded into urban centers, and labor was remarkably cheap. The army of specialized professions dealing with excrement before central waste treatment, documented in Stephen Johnson's The Ghost Map, is a study in evolutionary niches in employment. Large-scale industry ultimately required shifts of labor, and needed people at particular locations at relatively precise times. Alarm clocks weren't yet both reliable and affordable; even an accurate watch was expensive in its own right. (Tea was also a key component, providing antibiotic properties, alertness, and avoiding the consumption of small beer. See Tom Standage's tour de force, A History of the World in Six Glasses, for more on impact of beverages on human society.) Such odd professions persist in places where cheap labor is in abundance, and slums sit toe-to-toe with skyscrapers. India has the best known of these--the wallahs of all stripes and varieties, who carry out tasks that in the so-called developed world are too expensive to conceive of (the dabbawallahs who deliver meals from a home to an office mid-day in the tens of thousands in Mumbai alone), engaged in largely by high-priced professionals (street barbers, doctors, and ear cleaners), or automated or motorized (dish- and clotheswashing). Mental Floss compiled a list earlier this year of seven pre-alarm clock waker-uppers, including the knocker-upper. But I have children: I haven't needed an alarm clock since my first was born.   |
| Pleideans shot down U.S. mystery missile attack on Iran Posted: 09 Nov 2010 09:03 PM PST The truth about yesterday's mysterious missile launch. Thought you'd like to know. [Colleen Thomas' YouTube, via Gruber]   |
| JourneyQuest: fan-supported, CC-licensed fantasy/comedy series Posted: 09 Nov 2010 07:01 PM PST JourneyQuest is an independently produced, fan-financed, Creative Commons licensed comic fantasy series about "a wizard with a quest problem." It's just concluded its first season of seven short episodes; I've watched the first couple and am thoroughly hooked (and impressed! Great production values, acting and writing!). JourneyQuest - Episode 1: Onward (Thanks, Jack!) |
| Posted: 09 Nov 2010 09:32 PM PST Tomorrow is Institute for the Future's "Robotics Renaissance" conference. We developed a slew of materials to present our research on the topic, including a visual map that summarizes our forecasts about the future of robotics. As with a lot of IFTF stuff, the map will be released under a Creative Commons license, and I'll post it here when it's available. To get geared up for the conference, I forced my colleagues to enjoy the above bit of sci-fi rock opera bombast with me. Boy, were they delighted. This track is just classic. Dig some of the lyrics: You're wondering who I am - Machine or mannequin   |
| Posted: 09 Nov 2010 04:47 PM PST  According to Submitterator user Frycook, the largest image on Wikipedia is a 25MB, 461 megapixel panorama of the interior of the Georgetown Power Plant Museum in Seattle. My browser refused to render it, and it crashed three image apps before I found one that I could snap a thumbnail out of. Georgetown_PowerPlant_interior_pano.jpg (Thanks, Frycook, via Submitterator!) |
| T-Mobile G2 phones comprehensively jailbroken Posted: 09 Nov 2010 04:42 PM PST The new T-Mobile/HTC G2 Android phones have great specs, but they also have a "security feature" that wipes out any OS you install and replaces it with T-Mobile's crippled version of Android, with tethering disabled (T-Mobile also lards their default installation with un-deletable crapware). Mobile hackers have now figured out how to disable this bit of nastiness. At present, the process is pretty recondite, but they've promised idiot-proof automation by tomorrow. Maybe it's time to consider ditching my NexusOne and upgrading. T-Mobile G2 'Permaroot' Achieved   |
| TSA: checkpoint groping doesn't exist Posted: 09 Nov 2010 04:52 PM PST You know those outraged, desperate first-person reports of travellers being inappropriately groped by the TSA at American airports? The TSA's official blogger, Blogger Bob, says they don't exist: "there is no fondling, squeezing, groping, or any sort of sexual assault taking place at airports. You have a professional workforce carrying out procedures they were trained to perform to keep aviation security safe." (Thanks, Ross!)   |
| Science fictional music video set in near-future Indian city Posted: 09 Nov 2010 04:37 PM PST Alan sez, "I love this video, done by Sean Wainsteim for You Say Party's'Lonely Lunch.' It looks like a standard science fiction mini-story, but set in the crowded streets and alleys of an early-21st century Indian city such as Mumbai." What he said -- not my kind of music particularly, but boy, those are definitely my kind of visuals. Thronged Asian city stalked by high-tech plague doctor swat teams? Yes please. YOU SAY PARTY 'Lonely's Lunch' [OFFICIAL VIDEO] (Thanks, Alan!)   |
| The future of paper, or possibly wood, or both Posted: 09 Nov 2010 04:25 PM PST  File this one under More Krazy Koncept Products: Newspapers, which are made from wood, are themselves used to make "wood" in this project from a Dutch design house, Vij5. Or, to give it its accurate name, "NewspaperWood." (PDF) When a NewspaperWood log is cut, the layers of paper appear like lines of a wood grain or the rings of a tree and therefore resembles the aesthetic of real wood. The material can be cut, milled and sanded and generally treated like any other type of wood.Presumably this means the stuff could be pulped and processed into paper, or "paper," or "NewspaperWoodPaper," which would be a big ecological breakthrough. I think. I'm actually pretty confused right now. (Via Inhabitat.)   |
| Posted: 09 Nov 2010 07:33 PM PST  Eric often sends me links that crack me up, so my first response on Friday when I saw he forwarded me a parody response by Mick Jagger to Keith Richards's recent autobiography was to prepare for a good laugh. The alleged response, called "Please allow me to correct a few things," is, in fact, written by ace rock critic Bill Wyman, who has the novelty of sharing a name with the Stones' two-decades-gone original bass player. Wyman, who once received a legal demand by the bassist to change the name he was born with, seemed uniquely positioned to write a cutting fake retort. Then I began reading and realized this was No Joke. As a longtime Stones devotee (read Late night thoughts about the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world for one recent example), I've often wondered what the surviving original members really think about each other, how they work together, what their work means to them as they're aging. Wyman has clearly spent way too much time pondering this, too. I've never talked to Mick, but Wyman's faux-Mick response feels true to my imagined Jagger. The tone of the essay veers from hurt to self-righteous, apologetic to withering, the voice always taut. Fake Mick hates Keith as much as Real Keith hates Mick; this essay shoots down Richards's book Life but doesn't forget to point the gun inward from time to time. Yet, more than anything else, Wyman's version of Jagger is full of love for Richards, regretful that money, drugs, and narcissism tore them apart, grateful for what they had together before they devolved into mere business partners. He knows how much he owes Keith ("Without him, what would I have been? Peter Noone?") and how Keith's work can still touch him, no matter how far they've both fallen ("When a song is beautiful -- those spare guitars rumbling and chiming, by turns -- the words mean so much more, and there, for a moment, I believe him, and feel for him.") This is idealized stuff. It's unlikely that Real Mick's response to Keith's book, if there ever is one, will be as tough-minded and vulnerable. Wyman conjures up the Stones as we want them to be at this late age, but even we diehards know that's just our imagination running away with us. UPDATE: Wyman has written a postscript to his terrific piece.  |
| Haiku for people who hate cilantro Posted: 09 Nov 2010 03:38 PM PST  I was pleased to learn that Trader Joe's has recalled products containing that vile culinary interloper, cilantro. I hope this causes lots of people to fear this noxious, puke-inducing abomination. Maybe it will lead to a worldwide ban. After hearing the good news, I went over to IHateCilantro.com to see what my comrades had to say. So far, not much, aside from a haiku about it: Whaat? Cilantro foods Some of the other cilantro haiku here are funny: Egg salad sandwich Photo by JB. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. |
| Action Plants: time-lapse videos Posted: 09 Nov 2010 02:24 PM PST From Pink Tentacle: "Various Japanese plants (and fungi) spring to life in Omni/ScienceNet's 'Action Plant' series of time-lapse videos shot in Kōchi prefecture." |
| The Adventures of White-Man: satirical toy puppetry from Paul Zaloom Posted: 09 Nov 2010 01:20 PM PST In the video above, three excerpts from Paul Zaloom's new toy theater puppet show, "The Adventures of White-Man." Paul Zaloom is a comedic puppeteer, political satirist, filmmaker, and performance artist who lives and works in Los Angeles and tours his work all over the world. Zaloom has written, designed and performed 13 full length solo spectacles, including Fruit of Zaloom, Velvetville, his latest, with Lynn Jeffries, The Adventures of White-Man. Video Link. I really want to see this live. Incidentally, Zaloom was "Beakman" on the kids' science show "Beakman's World." This clip comes to Boing Boing from my friend, filmmaker Sean Meredith. "With painter Sandow Birk, he was my creative partner on Dante's Inferno and In Smog and Thunder, Sean explains. "He has been a member of Bread and Puppet since the early 1970s. Lord Buckley is one of his big heroes." |
| Photographer: I got griggs'd 4.5 million times by Texas Posted: 09 Nov 2010 02:15 PM PST  Left: Photographer D.K. Langford claims this Texas vehicle inspection sticker rips off his photograph. Right: The photograph on which Langford's lawsuit against the Department of Public Safety and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is based. (Source) Since "to griggs" has been proposed as a verb in (dis)honor of Judith Griggs of Cooks Source, Texas photographer David K. Langford is facing similar drama with the state of Texas. In this case the scofflaws happened to be prison inmates in a state-run program to design vehicle inspection stickers: The suit says Langford's photo was illegally appropriated by an inmate who scanned it from a copy of Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine in 1998. ... Open-record requests identified the prisoner who scanned the photo as a man serving a life term for aggravated sexual assault. As with the Monica Gaudio case, common courtesy would probably have avoided the whole mess. Interesting how some commenters in the original article share Griggs' attitude and think Langford should simply be "honored" that his work was used without payment or attribution. "If they'd called me first, I'd bet we'd have had a deal in five minutes," Langford said. There are plenty of free images Texas could have used to avoid the whole mess. Support free culture! |
| Factory farmers in Israel stumped by animal rights activists' well-hidden webcam Posted: 09 Nov 2010 12:47 PM PST A group of animal rights activists seeking to draw awareness to the cruelty of battery hen farming operations have hidden a webcam in a factory farm in Israel. The result: a live webstream that shows these animals confined in conditions that would widely be regarded as inhumane, and gross. The factory farm managers haven't been able to locate the cam. (via Submitterator, thanks christackett)   |
| Justice Dept. Will Not Prosecute CIA Agents Who Destroyed Torture Tapes Posted: 09 Nov 2010 12:29 PM PST Via the Submitterator, Boing Boing reader insert says, "Despite pending lawsuits, in 2005, the CIA destroyed videotapes of its 'harsh interrogation techniques' (translated from Newspeak, that means torture). When anybody else does this, it's obstruction of justice. But when CIA agents do it, it is 'heroic' and 'patriotic.' The Department of Justice's investigation just happened to take long enough that the statute of limitations ran out."   |
| Jumping Kitteh: HOW HAI? (Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 09 Nov 2010 11:49 AM PST  "Junior the Jumping Cat," a photo contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by BB reader John Kieltyka, of Seattle. He has more wonderful shots of doggies captured mid-flight, too: "Monkey," and "Tilly." So great! |
| National Gaming Day at your library: US libraries invite patrons to get their game on Posted: 09 Nov 2010 11:29 AM PST Jenny "Shifted Librarian" Levine sez, "Tens of thousands of people will be gaming together at their local libraries on Saturday, Nov. 13, to celebrate the American Library Association's 3rd annual National Gaming Day @ your library. Libraries will offer a variety of activities, including modern board games, traditional games (such as chess and checkers) and two national video game tournaments that will pit players at dozens of libraries against each other for bragging rights to the ultimate Rock Band and Super Smash Bros. Brawl crowns." More than 1,800 libraries to celebrate National Gaming Day on Nov. 13 (Thanks, Jlevine, via Submitterator!)   |
| Your wife is embarrassed by your tiny paycheck ad: Dec, 1929 Posted: 09 Nov 2010 11:24 AM PST  This December, 1929 continuing education ad from Modern Mechanix tells men that their neighbors are secretly shaking their heads in pity for their wives because of their paltry paychecks -- a mere two months after the Black Friday crash of 1929. Like it or not, your friends and neighbors size you up by what you EARN --judged by your home and family. Why not surprise them by making good in a big way? Tell them nothing, but on the quiet fit yourself for a bigger place!Do Your Friends Feel Sorry for Your Wife? (Dec, 1929)   |
| Posted: 09 Nov 2010 11:19 AM PST |
| RIP, Robbins Barstow, godfather of the home movie revival Posted: 09 Nov 2010 05:04 PM PST Robbins Barstow, the wonderful father of the home movie revival, has died at home at the age of 91. Barstow's magnificent vintage home movies circulated on the Internet after he began to transfer and upload them: whimsical shorts of Barstow's family vacations in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as movies from Barstow's childhood that recreated popular adventure serials with a lot of verve and humor. Barstow's films were subsequently included in the US National Film Registry, and sparked a national campaign to rescue and disseminate home movies. Although the film world got to know Robbins through his movies, he also worked as the director of professional development for the Connecticut Educational Association. He was also a founder of the Cetacean Society International, and many of his Barstow Travel Adventures as well as the 1970s sequel to Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge focused on his love for the great whales.Rest in peace, Robbins. You were an inspiration to people all over the world. Robbins Barstow (1919-2010) (Thanks, Molly!)   |
| Google Street View shows what the world really looks like Posted: 09 Nov 2010 11:20 AM PST  MapCrunch is addictive. Select the countries you'd like to include, then click go. You'll see Google Street View photos that are nothing like the photos in tourist brochures. (Via Gurney Journey) |
| New factory in Mojave to produce White Knight spacecraft for Virgin Galactic space tourism Posted: 09 Nov 2010 10:59 AM PST 
TSC plans to finish the 68,000-square-foot facility by September, 2011. "It expects to build three White Knight aircraft, which resemble massive flying catamarans, and five smaller SpaceShipTwo rocket planes," according to the LA Times.
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| Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds Posted: 09 Nov 2010 11:12 AM PST For 10 weeks, a Kansas State University human nutrition professor ate nothing but sugary snack cakes, candy bars, cookies, sweetened breakfast cereal, and chips. He lost 27 pounds. (He also "took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.")
Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds Photo by Mykl Roventine. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. |
| Make guitar picks from plastic cards Posted: 09 Nov 2010 10:36 AM PST |
| Elvis' (fake) drug prescription Posted: 09 Nov 2010 03:46 PM PST  Elvis Presley's physician had very good handwriting! (Click to embiggen.) (Via) UPDATE: Boing Boing reader Brock says: "It's a fake. The zipcode should be '38104,' not '34108.'" He's right! |
| The Realist: every issue now online! Posted: 09 Nov 2010 09:58 AM PST    In 1958, Paul Krassner launched The Realist, a satirical counterculture newsletter that decades later was a major inspiration to me personally as a young journalist and also to Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair when they created the bOING bOING print 'zine in 1989. As Mark said a few years ago, The Realist was "a freak's version of Mad magazine." In fact, the first issue was created at the Mad headquarters! Well now, the entire run of The Realist is now available online for free. That's 146 full issues, nearly 3,000 pages including bonus material and ephemera! What a gift.The Realist Archive Project (Thanks, Doug Rushkoff!)
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| Posted: 09 Nov 2010 09:55 AM PST To Eris, human! In 2006, Pluto got downgraded to "dwarf planet", partially because researchers found several celestial bodies of about the same size, and one that was actually larger. That husky cousin, Eris, is in the news again this week as new measurements suggest it might be smaller, in diameter, than Pluto, after all. Everybody seems to be turning this into a, "Will Pluto be a real planet, again?" story. But Scientific American gets into the really interesting part. The new research shows Eris having a smaller diameter than Pluto, but much more mass. The next questions: Is this right? And, if so, what's Eris made of?   |
| Posted: 09 Nov 2010 10:15 AM PST Master disassembler iFixIt is promoting the Self-Repair Manifesto. The slogans are music to the ears of anyone who believes in the joy of discovery, whether you're learning about nature, abstract properties, or technological artifacts. They're giving away 1,500 posters of the above image at no cost; you can also download it as a PDF. The theses:
I've repaired a number of my devices in recent years, from washing machines to Apple laptops, and felt that I've learned, saved, and greened, all with the smug little pleasure of defeating The Man. Whoever That Man is. iFixIt has a vested interest in this campaign worth noting: the company sells spare parts and upgrades, mostly for Apple equipment. On the flip side, iFixIt is assembling a giant directory of free repair manuals for all manner of manufactured goods. The company also publishes near-instant dissections of popular new electronics, like Microsoft Kinect and the iPhone 4, as a combination of promotion and exploration.   |
| Posted: 09 Nov 2010 09:57 AM PST  The world's tallest Jesus statue is now presiding over Swiebodzin, Poland. It is 170 feet (52 meters) tall from base of the mound to tip of the crown. The 33 meter body represents Christ's lifetime of 33 years. Hopefully, this Jesus will not suffer the same fiery fate as Cincinnati's six-story tall Touchdown Jesus a few months ago. From CNN: "This is the culmination of my life's work as a priest. I felt inspired to fulfill Jesus' will, and today I give thanks to him for allowing me to fulfill his will," Father Zawadzki said after the head was attached by a 700-ton crane, according to a report from the Warsaw Business Journal. The height of the plaster and fiberglass Polish statue surpasses the 40.4-meter (133-foot) Cristo de la Concordia in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and the 39.6-meter (130-foot) Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, according to news reports."World's tallest Jesus statue complete"
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Lots of kids play games at home - alone, with siblings or with friends. At the library, kids socialize with their friends and play board and video games while surrounded by books, librarians and knowledge. Gaming at the library encourages patrons to interact with diverse peers, share their expertise with others (including adults) and develop new strategies for gaming and learning. Families can join others in making time to play together at their library while meeting new people and trying out new games in a safe and friendly atmosphere. 
For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub's pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned. 
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